Alan is outside the building in the early morning verbally forecasting an oppressive heat for later in the day, enjoying a morning cigarette with his vending machine coffee and looking forward to another eternity where his minty Nicorette gum will taste like stale beer and the acrid scent of his dead grandmother’s carpet along with all the odiferous trimmings of last night in the thick of a pool hall. He’ll drag and drag out the inevitable by making several subsequent trips to this same spot on the pavement to yellow his fingers in anticipation of having the same mist and reality follow him into the morrow.
Others with gravely voices and smelling of a rustic taste will offer commentary on the heat as well while not attempting to distance themselves from cliché or adage. Alan nods his stained beard to dissuade persistence and gives an understanding glimpse of burnt marshmallow teeth, for putting up with inane banter is the price of being a professional and the true cost of being a smoker.
Across town and heading into the thick of a swampy afternoon, Shantel drags herself, optimistically, to the door again to face the drone of cicadas, prickly brown grass, and helium bomb sun threatening to kill or approximate all of these external factors while at the same time satisfying the strange insect, landscape, and heat source hidden from sight by the cracked tan of her hide.
It’s there near the weather-checked parking lot that Liz joins her to talk about how fucking bad she needs this. They inhale with a shared sense of purpose to vent, to run tongues over heat, and to paint their insides with a learned residue. Squint-provoking warmth soon clears the fog that billows from the brown filmed interior of their lips like stinky phantasms, escaping nowhere, never clouding the atmosphere except through repetition. Yet the haze in their minds is already returning as the nicotine colleagues take turns kicking at the faux gravel of the stand-alone ash tray before entering the excessively cool halls of outdated and speckled office carpet that beat a worn path back to the same place they’ll be returning here from in the next 30 to 45 minutes.
As evening dawns and takes root in a historic neighborhood, the coolness has now occasionally blown through the vacant walls of porches like a vapor invader, but still there lingers doubt in Karen’s mind about compulsion, compulsiveness, indecision, and question of ample supply, burning as hot now as desire in the yellowed flesh of her cheeks for another taste of the dirty snack, the purpleness of exposed veins deprived of oxygen, or the softer colors associated with a good night kiss.
Anne of Green Gremlins drives by as the orange horizon becomes more fabric like, honking and extending her pale hand out the window in a gesture of greeting followed by a hoarse shout. The glowing cherry from her menthol blows into the colors of dusk, prompting rhetorical questions about the location of her damn matches.
Karen sits waiting for something on the bench swing that descends on chains from the tongue-in-groove ceiling, but she’s not sure what. Perhaps relief from this pang will finally be smitten into attrition by extensive exposure to fresh air. But not wanting to risk that sickly feeling again, she places another ‘after dinner mint’ into a long black filter from back in smoking’s glory days, and draws on it fully in order to feel like a temporary celebrity. But at least she’s politically correct about it.
Her smoke wafts upwards like family tradition through Aunt Ginny’s open bedroom window where she’s poised on the edge of the bed in a padded night coat inhaling with nostalgia, resisting change as firmly as the hardened Aqua Net that keeps her beehive upright.
thewritehoiberg 